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Oracle Offers Custom Intel Chips and Unanticipated Costs

Posted by timothy on from the your-fries-come-with-lobster dept.

jfruh (300774) writes "For some time, Intel has been offering custom-tweaked chips to big customers. While most of the companies that have taken them up on this offer, like Facebook and eBay, put the chips into servers meant for internal use, Oracle will now be selling systems running on custom Xeons directly to end users. Those customers need to be careful about how they configure those systems, though: in the new Oracle 12c, the in-memory database option, which costs $23,000 per processor, is turned on by default."

3 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. So, what does the in-memory database option do? by timeOday · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This being slashdot, it would be nice to have the article on "gotcha" licensing accompanied by at least as much information what it actually is, and when it would be worth paying for. (And not just some snarky comments about how cheaper databases already have in-memory tables, unless that's really all it is!)

  2. Re:Sales flow chart. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How does PostGreSQL compare? Pretty well. I used to be an Oracle DBA (between Oracle 6 and 10g) but now much prefer Postgres. At the very high end of things, Oracle may well perform better. But Postgres is much better to work with, has excellent support organisations (unlike Oracle who will charge you a fortune to mostly just waste your time), is very feature-rich, and is generally a pleasure to use. If you have such data and transaction volumes that Postgres simple won't cut it, you should probably question whether Relational is the right paradigm.

    Give Postgres a try, it's pretty easy to get started. And if anyone tells you MySQL is faster, ignore them until they prove it using your application and realistic transaction volumes.

    Frankly I wouldn't touch Oracle with someone else's 10 foot pole.

  3. Re:Sales flow chart. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    DB/2? What about PostgreSQL?

    Because PostgreSQL doesn't support shared-storage, active-active clusters. PostgreSQL "clusters" use replication to provide a warm standby using separate storage.

    So you need twice the (high-speed) disk storage for a PostgreSQL solution.

    That's just the database. Now you need to add clustering/HA to that, with pgpool. And pgpool is a turd. Yeah, it's better than NO standby/cluster. But set up a test PostgreSQL/pgpool cluster and really start beating on it - pull some plugs, shut down hardware, "kill -9" some database and/or pgpool processes. And watch pgpool piss all over itself.

    In short, if you want a true clustered database solution, it's Oracle or DB2.